Iridium STL is being deployed by L3Harris to protect critical FAA data center infrastructure.

Iridium Communications signed a five-year commercial contract with L3Harris Technologies for the Iridium Satellite Time and Location (STL) service. Iridium signed the agreement on April 9.

Under the agreement, Iridium will provide the STL service to more than three dozen L3Harris communications network nodes and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) facilities throughout the U.S. 

L3Harris’s private nationwide network for the FAA, provides voice, data, and video communications for the National Airspace System operations. This network will utilize the Iridium STL to support critical datacenter infrastructure applications and remove dependencies on GPS as its primary time synchronization source.

Compact devices, provided by Adtran’s Oscilloquartz division, that receive Iridium STL signals are also included in the solution for L3Harris. 

“STL solutions offer cost-effective resiliency in critical infrastructure environments where GPS is unreliable or unavailable, so L3Harris and the FAA can benefit from uninterrupted, high-performance operations, ” said Christina Riley, vice president and general manager of Commercial Resilient Time and Location at Iridium.

This comes soon after Iridium completed its acquisition of Satelles and integrated the company’s Satellite Time and Location (STL) service on April 2.